If I remember correctly, the PS3 is supposed to support 2 displays, which would explain why they are making it support 7 players. I agree that otherwise it would seem like a completely boneheaded move. I think they are doing this to appeal to the same people who hosted Halo LAN parties.
So, why don't you like it? I've been thinking of getting a subscription, and I'd like to hear someone's negatives. If anyone has any positive experiences to add, I'd like to hear those, too.:)
These pictures don't look that different.... In fact, in the first comparison, I thought the "better" picture just looked more blurry. In the second set of pictures, the enlarged versions were hard to compare because they were different sizes! After flipping back and forth between the larger versions a couple of times, I didn't see a noticeable difference.
Maybe the later comparisons were more illustrative of the 360's graphical improvements, but I didn't see a whole lot to get excited about.
Easy solution: Someone make an interpreter that reads music files or encrypted files, or even better, ANY DATA FILE, as code. Just read sequences of bytes, and map each to a particular instruction, making sure to limit your language to be tolerant of bad memory accesses, or just disallow any bad accesses.
Such an interpreter could be used to make digital art. Then, any data file run through it -is- code.:) If no one has coined this idea yet, I claim first patent rights to it.:)
Mass is fighting the good fight on this one. I'm not sure who exactly is behind it, but, as a resident, I decided it would be best for me to contact them and let them know how much I approved. I just contacted the ITD (Information Technology Division) and let them know what I thought, and asked if there was someone better to whom I could send my thank yous.
Our leaders need to hear from us when they're doing a good job.
I should add that it's also okay to have a grudge for 15 years, but I figure it's better to eventually forgive, assuming the person/entity has reformed. If I held a grudge for that long, I'd hate a whole lot of people, corporations, etc.
Maybe if Microsoft reformed, these people would be happy to support them, too.
There's nothing wrong with liking someone who was once a criminal, and has since reformed (I won't get into the merits of punishment). It's also silly to say that I should blame one person for another's crimes, i.e. the reformed person, because "he did it first!"
This is weird, but in a good way, I think.... Penny Arcade has, almost certainly by accident, formed a type of political action group, like all those concerned mothers groups, religious groups, etc. And it's a group that seems to be actually accomplishing things (maybe unlike Slashdot and some political communities). It's kind of funny to think that part of the reason this group is actually doing things is both because it is very passionate, and a larger percentage of it has lots of free time (i.e. no job, part time job, still living with parents, in college, etc.).
It's realy interesting, and I'm not trying to imply anything negative about the Penny Arcade audience, as I'm certainly one of them (although not a very active one, unfortunately). In fact, I think it could be a very positive thing if they can get the media, politicians (could they be considered a constituency?), and just plain other people to listen to them. Heck, now might be a good time to introduce some of these people to the EFF, or get them otherwise politically involved. *shrug*
My wife and I are on our second play-through of Tales of Symphonia for the Gamecube. It's a fun RPG with cooperative realtime combat, simple controls, and lots of replayability (storyline branches, hidden subplots, different character upgrade paths, lots of hidden items, etc.) You should be able to get it for $20 now, and it's definitely worth it. We easily have put in over 100 hours of play time in the 6 months that we've owned it.
The only downsides I see are that the voice acting is sometimes a little over the top, and the story is pretty convoluted (but interesting). I remember thinking the first time though, "So, are they going to tie it all up at the end and make everything make sense, or are they just kind of making it up as they go along? It turns out that the story is indeed consistent. The second time through I can see a lot of the foreshadowing, and the double meanings of certain things some of the characters say. It's one of the things that makes it worth playing more than once.
I think the emulation scene, as well as the emergence of the old-school-all-NES-games-on-one-machine pirate ripoff machines I've seen in some malls (and from what I have heard have been mostly reported and shut down), are a good indicator of the possible success of this idea.
On another note, I know that I'm especially looking forward to getting some of those NES and SNES games I never got to play, such as Earthbound and Chrono Trigger (assuming they get 3rd party games, too). I admit that I could play some of these games on an emulator for free, but it's just not the same, especially for multiplayer games like the original Mario Kart.
For those of you totally confused by my parent post, it appears that Link will have an eagle companion (you can see it in some of the screen shots). Also, a masked creature rides him while he is in wolf form in another screenshot. I have no idea what this creature is, but it's remiscent (to me at least) of the deku scrub antagonist from Majora's Mask, who wasn't really a bad guy until the mask possessed him. *shrug* Hopefully there are tie-ins like this. I always like when sequels reference past games.:)
it appears that they think Link will turn into a wolf by night, and Zelda into an eagle (or falcon, or something) by day, sort of along the lines of the characters in the movie "movie Ladyhawke." I'm just basically parrotting this from the article, though.
I think it could lend itself to some interesting gameplay. Maybe cooperative multiplayer, sort of like with Tingle in the The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker? Hopefully it would be more in-depth than that was, though.... My wife was bummed to have to sit out all of the boss fights.:(
I wonder what the limits of this download service will be?
It would be awesome if you could download some of these games if you had purchased them previously (NES and SNES games), but I doubt they'd offer that service. It would be too much of a pain to implement.
Also, I wonder if they'll ever let you download Gamecube and Revolution games? I figure the answer to that is "no" because the games are so big. Bandwidth would be a problem, as downloading a full game would take -forever. Also, the size constraints on the onboard flash RAM (512 MB) would be problematic for this. However, if they make available old N64 games, that space might fill up pretty quick anyway.... However, there's always the possibility of a hard drive peripheral:)
Thanks for the info! I'll probably be trying out a number of these package systems in the near future. Fink pretty much does what I want it to do, but it would be interesting to see how the other options compare.
What is this? I followed your link, but there was no obvious explanation for what it -is-. I get that it's Gentoo, but since it requires OS X to be used, I assume it's just portage for OS-X-compatible unix packages. When I hear "Gentoo," I think of the whole Linux OS. Could anyone with any experience with this enlighten me? If it's a competitor to DarwinPorts, Fink, and pkgsrc, I'd like to have some information to compare it. As it is, the link you provided just gives me an installation howto.
However, maybe I'm just blind and missed the whole explanation of what it is. If anyone with any experience with it could enlighten me, though, that'd be much appreciated.
My favorites include some of the Cheap Ass games (http://www.cheap-ass.com/). They are wacky, usually have an interesting play dynamic, and cheap ($10 or less usually). My favorites include:
Falling - Awesome, fast card game based around the idea that everyone is falling, and fighting. The winner is the last person to hit the ground (so in effect, everyone is eventually a loser, because everyone eventually hits the ground). Games usually take less than 5 minutes, so you don't feel so bad if you lose.
Spree - Another really fun one. The theme is a competitive shopping spree in a mall, with guns and cars. It gives you lots of opportunities to screw over your opponents. It's one that I always request at parties.
Kill Dr. Lucky - This one is a bit like reverse Clue. You try to get into the room alone with Dr. Lucky, and out of sight of other players (via windows and doors into adjacent rooms), and try to kill him. It has an interesting psychological component, because other players may have cards to stop you, but they don't have to use them, and can pressure other players to use up their stopper cards instead. If there is too much manipulation going on, they might actually lose the game for themselves. I like this one a lot, too, but it's not as hectic as the previous two mentioned (which is one reason why I like them).
I have one other favorite that I always request, too, but it's not a Cheap Ass game. It is called Ricochet Robot, and it is basically a competitive pathfinding game in which you try to get one of four colored robots to a particular square on the game board. Each round is timed, and the person who bids the best path first (better paths have less steps), and proves it after the time runs out, gets a point for that round.
Here's a link to what appears to be the product website: http://www.riograndegames.com/games/rio122.html, but the description isn't that much better than the one I gave above. There is a picture, however. Here's a link to an online Java applet that appears to have the same game dynamic: http://www.braunston.com/kevin/rrobot/rrobot.html. I really enjoy this game, but it could be because I win often among my friends.:)
I believe Ricochet Robot is out of print, however, so it may be difficult to find. I've seen a used copy in one of my local hobby shops, and my friend has a copy, so maybe it's not -that- hard to locate. I think I also heard a rumor that it was going to be reprinted, but I haven't checked up on that.
Actually, according to PlanetGamecube (haven't seen anything about it anywhere else, but I haven't really looked), you will be able to hook up multiple gamecubes using a hub.
Why do people keep repeating this? XBoxes bought give Microsoft more money than XBoxex left on store shelves, and buying them gives Microsoft bigger numbers to report when they want to claim how popular the XBox is.
The author's name is actually Frederick Brooks.:) I agree that the book should be required reading for CS students. Hopefully, every college-level software engineering professor already at -least- recommends it to students, if not requiring them to read it. I believe most do recommend it, and I believe software engineering is becoming a required course at most universities, so this is good.
This question was brought up in my theory course a few semesters ago. And it's a completely valid question. The answer my professor gave was that you don't run into polynomial time algorithms with this large of an exponent. If something can be shown to run in polynomial time at all, then it can almost certainly be optimized to have a fairly low exponent (10 or less). If you're really curious to test this, you should look around for optimized polynomial time algorithms and see if you can find one with a huge exponent. I think it will be very difficult to do, if not impossible.
Slashdot Mirror
If I remember correctly, the PS3 is supposed to support 2 displays, which would explain why they are making it support 7 players. I agree that otherwise it would seem like a completely boneheaded move. I think they are doing this to appeal to the same people who hosted Halo LAN parties.
So, why don't you like it? I've been thinking of getting a subscription, and I'd like to hear someone's negatives. If anyone has any positive experiences to add, I'd like to hear those, too. :)
These pictures don't look that different.... In fact, in the first comparison, I thought the "better" picture just looked more blurry. In the second set of pictures, the enlarged versions were hard to compare because they were different sizes! After flipping back and forth between the larger versions a couple of times, I didn't see a noticeable difference.
Maybe the later comparisons were more illustrative of the 360's graphical improvements, but I didn't see a whole lot to get excited about.
Easy solution: Someone make an interpreter that reads music files or encrypted files, or even better, ANY DATA FILE, as code. Just read sequences of bytes, and map each to a particular instruction, making sure to limit your language to be tolerant of bad memory accesses, or just disallow any bad accesses.
:) If no one has coined this idea yet, I claim first patent rights to it. :)
Such an interpreter could be used to make digital art. Then, any data file run through it -is- code.
What about NeoOffice/J or Abiword? NeoOffice/J worked just fine for me.
Also, there might be some hope that Apple's Pages might support the format in the future.
Mass is fighting the good fight on this one. I'm not sure who exactly is behind it, but, as a resident, I decided it would be best for me to contact them and let them know how much I approved. I just contacted the ITD (Information Technology Division) and let them know what I thought, and asked if there was someone better to whom I could send my thank yous. Our leaders need to hear from us when they're doing a good job.
I should add that it's also okay to have a grudge for 15 years, but I figure it's better to eventually forgive, assuming the person/entity has reformed. If I held a grudge for that long, I'd hate a whole lot of people, corporations, etc.
Maybe if Microsoft reformed, these people would be happy to support them, too.
There's nothing wrong with liking someone who was once a criminal, and has since reformed (I won't get into the merits of punishment). It's also silly to say that I should blame one person for another's crimes, i.e. the reformed person, because "he did it first!"
This is weird, but in a good way, I think.... Penny Arcade has, almost certainly by accident, formed a type of political action group, like all those concerned mothers groups, religious groups, etc. And it's a group that seems to be actually accomplishing things (maybe unlike Slashdot and some political communities). It's kind of funny to think that part of the reason this group is actually doing things is both because it is very passionate, and a larger percentage of it has lots of free time (i.e. no job, part time job, still living with parents, in college, etc.).
It's realy interesting, and I'm not trying to imply anything negative about the Penny Arcade audience, as I'm certainly one of them (although not a very active one, unfortunately). In fact, I think it could be a very positive thing if they can get the media, politicians (could they be considered a constituency?), and just plain other people to listen to them. Heck, now might be a good time to introduce some of these people to the EFF, or get them otherwise politically involved. *shrug*
Sony is teh Doomed!
:)
Oh, sorry, I forgot. This only happens if -Nintendo- posts a loss.
My wife and I are on our second play-through of Tales of Symphonia for the Gamecube. It's a fun RPG with cooperative realtime combat, simple controls, and lots of replayability (storyline branches, hidden subplots, different character upgrade paths, lots of hidden items, etc.) You should be able to get it for $20 now, and it's definitely worth it. We easily have put in over 100 hours of play time in the 6 months that we've owned it.
The only downsides I see are that the voice acting is sometimes a little over the top, and the story is pretty convoluted (but interesting). I remember thinking the first time though, "So, are they going to tie it all up at the end and make everything make sense, or are they just kind of making it up as they go along? It turns out that the story is indeed consistent. The second time through I can see a lot of the foreshadowing, and the double meanings of certain things some of the characters say. It's one of the things that makes it worth playing more than once.
I think the emulation scene, as well as the emergence of the old-school-all-NES-games-on-one-machine pirate ripoff machines I've seen in some malls (and from what I have heard have been mostly reported and shut down), are a good indicator of the possible success of this idea.
On another note, I know that I'm especially looking forward to getting some of those NES and SNES games I never got to play, such as Earthbound and Chrono Trigger (assuming they get 3rd party games, too). I admit that I could play some of these games on an emulator for free, but it's just not the same, especially for multiplayer games like the original Mario Kart.
For those of you totally confused by my parent post, it appears that Link will have an eagle companion (you can see it in some of the screen shots). Also, a masked creature rides him while he is in wolf form in another screenshot. I have no idea what this creature is, but it's remiscent (to me at least) of the deku scrub antagonist from Majora's Mask, who wasn't really a bad guy until the mask possessed him. *shrug* Hopefully there are tie-ins like this. I always like when sequels reference past games. :)
From this article at IGN:
:(
http://cube.ign.com/articles/615/615045p1.html
it appears that they think Link will turn into a wolf by night, and Zelda into an eagle (or falcon, or something) by day, sort of along the lines of the characters in the movie "movie Ladyhawke." I'm just basically parrotting this from the article, though.
I think it could lend itself to some interesting gameplay. Maybe cooperative multiplayer, sort of like with Tingle in the The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker? Hopefully it would be more in-depth than that was, though.... My wife was bummed to have to sit out all of the boss fights.
I wonder what the limits of this download service will be?
:)
It would be awesome if you could download some of these games if you had purchased them previously (NES and SNES games), but I doubt they'd offer that service. It would be too much of a pain to implement.
Also, I wonder if they'll ever let you download Gamecube and Revolution games? I figure the answer to that is "no" because the games are so big. Bandwidth would be a problem, as downloading a full game would take -forever. Also, the size constraints on the onboard flash RAM (512 MB) would be problematic for this. However, if they make available old N64 games, that space might fill up pretty quick anyway.... However, there's always the possibility of a hard drive peripheral
This sounds like what Apple has done with OS X. And I'd say it's been successful so far (it hooked me).
Thanks for the info! I'll probably be trying out a number of these package systems in the near future. Fink pretty much does what I want it to do, but it would be interesting to see how the other options compare.
What is this? I followed your link, but there was no obvious explanation for what it -is-. I get that it's Gentoo, but since it requires OS X to be used, I assume it's just portage for OS-X-compatible unix packages. When I hear "Gentoo," I think of the whole Linux OS. Could anyone with any experience with this enlighten me? If it's a competitor to DarwinPorts, Fink, and pkgsrc, I'd like to have some information to compare it. As it is, the link you provided just gives me an installation howto.
However, maybe I'm just blind and missed the whole explanation of what it is. If anyone with any experience with it could enlighten me, though, that'd be much appreciated.
My favorites include some of the Cheap Ass games (http://www.cheap-ass.com/). They are wacky, usually have an interesting play dynamic, and cheap ($10 or less usually). My favorites include:
. I really enjoy this game, but it could be because I win often among my friends. :)
Falling - Awesome, fast card game based around the idea that everyone is falling, and fighting. The winner is the last person to hit the ground (so in effect, everyone is eventually a loser, because everyone eventually hits the ground). Games usually take less than 5 minutes, so you don't feel so bad if you lose.
Spree - Another really fun one. The theme is a competitive shopping spree in a mall, with guns and cars. It gives you lots of opportunities to screw over your opponents. It's one that I always request at parties.
Kill Dr. Lucky - This one is a bit like reverse Clue. You try to get into the room alone with Dr. Lucky, and out of sight of other players (via windows and doors into adjacent rooms), and try to kill him. It has an interesting psychological component, because other players may have cards to stop you, but they don't have to use them, and can pressure other players to use up their stopper cards instead. If there is too much manipulation going on, they might actually lose the game for themselves. I like this one a lot, too, but it's not as hectic as the previous two mentioned (which is one reason why I like them).
I have one other favorite that I always request, too, but it's not a Cheap Ass game. It is called Ricochet Robot, and it is basically a competitive pathfinding game in which you try to get one of four colored robots to a particular square on the game board. Each round is timed, and the person who bids the best path first (better paths have less steps), and proves it after the time runs out, gets a point for that round.
Here's a link to what appears to be the product website: http://www.riograndegames.com/games/rio122.html, but the description isn't that much better than the one I gave above. There is a picture, however. Here's a link to an online Java applet that appears to have the same game dynamic: http://www.braunston.com/kevin/rrobot/rrobot.html
I believe Ricochet Robot is out of print, however, so it may be difficult to find. I've seen a used copy in one of my local hobby shops, and my friend has a copy, so maybe it's not -that- hard to locate. I think I also heard a rumor that it was going to be reprinted, but I haven't checked up on that.
Er, rather much larger.
Actually, according to PlanetGamecube (haven't seen anything about it anywhere else, but I haven't really looked), you will be able to hook up multiple gamecubes using a hub.
Why do people keep repeating this? XBoxes bought give Microsoft more money than XBoxex left on store shelves, and buying them gives Microsoft bigger numbers to report when they want to claim how popular the XBox is.
The author's name is actually Frederick Brooks. :) I agree that the book should be required reading for CS students. Hopefully, every college-level software engineering professor already at -least- recommends it to students, if not requiring them to read it. I believe most do recommend it, and I believe software engineering is becoming a required course at most universities, so this is good.
How about checking out the Christian Science Monitor (www.csmonitor.com)? Despite its name, I find its articles to be pretty unbiased journalism.
This question was brought up in my theory course a few semesters ago. And it's a completely valid question. The answer my professor gave was that you don't run into polynomial time algorithms with this large of an exponent. If something can be shown to run in polynomial time at all, then it can almost certainly be optimized to have a fairly low exponent (10 or less). If you're really curious to test this, you should look around for optimized polynomial time algorithms and see if you can find one with a huge exponent. I think it will be very difficult to do, if not impossible.